The Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s: 100-51

Our list of the Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s continues. Today we delve into the top 100; the final 50 begins on Thursday. Check Monday's entry for details about parameters of the list, and yesterday we had 150-100. Thanks for reading, dig in, and we'll be back tomorrow. (Listen to most of the tracks on our Spotify playlist.)

At first "Fourth of July" sounds barely like a Galaxie 500 song-- it's not slow, it's funny and breezy, and Dean Wareham kind of raps for half of it. You could even mistake it for King Missile, the way Kramer wraps thick echo around surreal Wareham couplets like "I wrote a poem on a dog biscuit/ And your dog refused to look at it." But "Fourth of July" ends up awash in Galaxie 500 trademarks-- sneaky drumming, syrupy bass, and treble-happy crescendos. Even the "na-na-na"s and "doo-doo-wah"'s are nothing new, just a little quicker than before. Perhaps the nagging uncertainty portrayed in the song-- "maybe I should just change my style"-- led to the band's soon-after demise. But for one infectious final single, it sounded like "Yes" and "No" were both right answers to that question. --Marc Masters

"My Boo" appeared on the inaugural So So Def Bass All Stars compilation, a frantic collection designed for stretching subwoofers. While other tracks on the proto-Dirty South comp feel very much of their time, the mushy "My Boo" feels positively immortal. The song's first 30 seconds match a heartfelt expression of desire to a fizzy, unadorned synth line; then the beat starts to clatter, the bass thwonks, the gear shifts, and you locate the connection between this and other Miami bass-inspired tracks.

Rayona "Suga Momma" Graham plays secret admirer, going out every weekend, praying for another chance run-in with the would-be boo; there's a fetching amateurishness to her voice which-- matched up with the sweaty homespun production-- lends the track an innocence that undercuts its occasional stalkery sentiment. Few one-off R&B hits of this or any other decade have had such legs; not only does the original endure as a cookout classic, its double-time balladry helped pave the way for swift and changeable turn-of-the-millenium pop like Destiny's Child, and its pining refrain has served as the jump-off for subsequent tracks from Mariah Carey and Dipset. --Paul Thompson

When else has a song about impotence ever sounded so sexy? Rock history is littered with songs about sex, but a relative few are from a woman's point of view. Fewer still are about bad or embarrassing sex-- though surely, musicians, like everyone else, have had their fair share. But on debut single "Stutter", Elastica's Justine Frischmann not only rants about her boyfriend's drunken bedroom failings, but also gives voice to the nagging uncertainty and niggling self-doubt that infects someone whose partner can't perform. Her questions could sound corny ("It's always something you ate?") or pitiful ("Is it the way that I touch you?"), but coming from Frischmann, the tough, androgynously styled First Lady of Britpop, they never do. Instead, her dry delivery makes it clear that, though frustrated, she is very much in control. So when she sings, "Is it just that I'm much too much for you?", you know the answer is probably "Yes." --Rebecca Raber

Go to an old-school hip-hop DJ night and wait for someone to throw this on: within five seconds, people will lose their shit. It could be the weed-ritual aspect of this Oakland duo's conversational lyrics: two guys with $5 each can go half on a dime bag, thus the chorus. As a tribute to getting high with broke friends, it's classic material whether you toke or not. But those first five seconds hold another key to what makes people really go off when this track's cued up: Tone Capone's beat juxtaposes this tinkling, crystalline, off-kilter keyboard riff with a bassline so heavy and deep it feels like it's coming from inside your head instead of a subwoofer. This balance of weight and weightlessness, combined with Yukmouth and Knumskill's sharp rapport and the inspired choice of Timex Social Club's Michael Marshall to sing the hook, makes for the quintessential West Coast smokers' anthem. --Nate Patrin

Primal Scream spent the 90s bouncing between identities: indie-dance visionaries, comical ersatz Southerners, paranoid dub rockers, and vowel-phobic noiseniks. So even on their great records successful elements could seem grafted or remixed on. "Higher Than the Sun", though, takes all the band's enthusiasms and makes sense of them together. Bobby Gillespie sounds as direct and intense in his drug evangelism-- "hallucinogens can open me or untie me"-- as he ever did making mid-80s indiepop. The loose, voyaging song structure is classic acid rock but the sounds come from then-current techno and ambient-- rainforest keyboard noises, a lazy bass pulse, dub drop-outs, and a Balearic burst of sax. And its wordless peak-- the bit that sounds like a forest full of E'd-up owls-- didn't sound like anything we'd heard before. Parent album Screamadelica is still their most consistent and delightful hour, but "Higher Than the Sun" is the track where its half-promise of a resurrected electronic psychedelia is truly kept. --Tom Ewing

"Lauryn is only human," admitted Hill in the middle of her debut solo single. Listening to "Doo Wop (That Thing)"-- which hit #1 at the tail end of 1998-- and the rest of her startling first album, Lauryn Hill seemed more than human. Much more. She could sing like a gospel-soul master while adding fresh and modern inflections. She could also rap with authority-- tough enough to hang with the guys while retaining a fierce femininity. "Doo Wop (That Thing)" showcased all of her skills in one generation-spanning stroke. While the term neo-soul was often used to describe classy-yet-unnecessary nostalgia trips in the late 90s, Lauryn Hill was one of the few to fulfill the genre's promise. The "soul" was there-- in her voice, the barbershop-ready bridge, and the sample of 60s/70s R&B group the 5th Dimension. And Hill brought her brand of "neo" by holding the track up with knocking drums the RZA could appreciate and questioning loose women and irresponsible dudes without wagging a finger. It all made her ensuing silence that much more tragic. --Ryan Dombal

"French Disko" first appeared (as "French Disco") as a bonus track on Stereolab's 1993 Jenny Ondioline EP. If you think of them as an album band, it's an anomaly: a headlong headbanger by a groop that generally preferred space-age bubble confections. Consider them as a singles act-- which they also always were-- and it's a moment of triumphant rupture on the order of "I Wanna Be Sedated" or "Running Up That Hill". In any case, it's the most compact presentation of a lot of Stereolab's strengths: Laetitia Sadier and Mary Hansen's lighter-than-air vocalization of heavier-than-textbooks Francophilic philosophy; Tim Gane's re-imaging of the rhythm guitar as perpetual motion machine; a broad set of ideas copped from vintage experimental music and spruced up into hooks. -- Douglas Wolk

Though he often tempered his fleet-fingered solos with piercing feedback and punk-inspired fervor, J Mascis had all the makings of a guitar god. It's on "Start Choppin'" that he finally, comfortably takes on the mantle: the song is saturated in nearly every available moment with guitar leads, yet it never feels weighed down by any of it. Their big slacker anthem came earlier ("Freak Scene"), and the Buzz Bin tried to make "Feel the Pain" the band's big hit later. But nothing came out quite as assured, as direct, as breezy and effortless as this did-- a perfect balance of the scene the band had come from and who they really were. --Jason Crock

There's something particularly stirring about songs that start with the word "And"-- we feel like we've shown up late and maybe already missed something crucial. On Hole's "Violet", what we seem to have missed is pretty much everything in a relationship that came before its horrifying conclusion. After the door is kicked in with Courtney Love's "And" over halting guitar strums, she sets the scene with two beautifully evocative and cinematic lines. From there, "Violet" looks at the rage-filled end of something through the prism of power, ripping through lines about the danger of not being able say, "No" and what happens to desire once "they" get what they want. The words are powerful but Love's delivery is what sells it-- she's living inside this song and we're compelled to watch as she thrashes around and tries to break out. The song led off Live Through This, an album that hit stores a week after Love's hugely famous husband had killed himself, which made its initial context disorienting; 16 years later, even given Love's endless trainwreck of a public life, it stands on its own. --Mark Richardson

If you happen to belong to the subset of younger Pitchfork readers who only know of Jeff Buckley thanks to network television's mandatory use of "Hallelujah" in at least one montage moment per season, two things: 1) Leave that song alone for a while, it needs some time; and 2) "Last Goodbye". Every bit as tremulous and aching as the song that unwittingly soundtracked a thousand season finales, this falsetto-rich slow burner ranks among Buckley's best in full band mode, and showcases a lightness of touch that, ironically, wasn't as evident when it was just him and a guitar. Despite being released at a time when the pulse of popular American rock music fell somewhere between grunge and Collective Soul, "Last Goodbye" was a modest hit that became the biggest commercial success of Buckley's living career. That he never got a chance to better it is a sad fact that's since become part of the song's meta-narrative. --Mark Pytlik